Prophecies of H.G.Wells

Prophecies of H.G.Wells

  • The time machine was one of many future technologies that H.G. Wells popularized in his 20 novels and dozens of short stories. Although such a device isn’t one of Wells’s fancies that has since come to fruition, a time machine is within the realm of possibility, said Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • H.G. Wells’s deadly heat ray, used by invading Martians in 1898’s The War of the Worlds, has become reality–albeit in a nonlethal form: above, the U.S. military’s Active Denial System stands at the ready at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia in January 2007. The device uses microwave radiation to make crowds uncomfortable enough to disperse.
  • The idea of antigravity technology goes back at least as far as the late 17th century, when Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier hypothesized that gravity was caused by bodies’ absorption of minute particles. That would mean gravity could be blocked by the right type of shielding.
  • H.G. Wells didn’t specifically envision the modern cell phone. But in the 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, he depicted a wireless wrist intercom that had many cell phone-like features.
  • Biological warfare : In H.G. Wells’s 1898 book The War of the Worlds, Martians are eventually defeated by bacteria–“slain after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this Earth,” Wells wrote.
  • In the 1899 novel When the Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells described 300-foot-wide (90-meter-wide) highways that move like giant conveyor belts, complete with seats and refreshment kiosks. Such an invention is a far cry from today’s moving walkways, often found in airports.
  • In H.G. Wells’s 1896 book The Island of Dr. Moreau, a doctor creates man-beasts and other fantastical creatures in an early version of genetic engineering.
  • H.G. Wells envisioned the sliding automatic door in his 1899 book When the Sleeper Wakes–more than a half-century before the first such door came into being
  • Invisibility, described in H.G. Wells’s 1897 book The Invisible Man, may move from the domain of fantasy into reality as scientists make new discoveries on how to conceal the human form. Above, a Tokyo University graduate student demonstrates a “disappearing coat” using optical camouflage technology in 2003.

Prophecies of H.G.Wells

Source : NationalGeographics